Building Games in Flash 5 - Part 3 - Enemies and collisions - Page 13

Now test your game. You should find that the you can now
restart the game when the game is over. And your lasers should be limited to
four lasers on the stage at any one time.

CONGRATULATIONS you've completed the tutorial and now have
built your own arcade game in Flash 5.

The next step provides some suggestions how you can improve
and extend your game.

Extending and improving the
game

These have been three quite long tutorials, but having
completed them you should now have a good sense of how arcade/action style games
can be built with flash 5.

While we have built a simple space flying game, many of
the core elements of the game could be used in a variety of action games. Almost
all action games involve player movement, enemy movement, collision detection
and scoring, which were all implemented in this game.

Some suggestions on how the game could be improved:

To keep the tutorial from being too long, the game was
kept as simple as possible. However there are quite a few improvements that
could be made to the game.

1. Make the game harder by increasing the speed of the
enemies or the number of enemies or limiting the laser fire.

2. If you noticed the game performing slowly or if movement was
a little jerky, this would be because the graphics and stage in the game are
quite large. Try reducing the size of the stage and game graphics. A smaller
version of the game is available in the downloadable zip file.

3. Try using bitmap graphics (eg: png format images) for
the backgrounds. Flash is designed to work with vector graphics, but you can
make fast and effective games using bitmap graphics provided you keep them small.

4. At the moment the player can move off the top, bottom
and left of the stage which is a bit unusual. You can prevent this by including
an extra test within you if statements for the player movement. eg:
if (Key.isDown(Key.LEFT)) would become if
(Key.isDown(Key.LEFT) and this._x>0)

5. Add in player lives so instead of the game ending when
the player collides with an enemy, the player just loses a life. You will need
to add in a lives variable and reduce this by one when the collision occurs.
When lives is equal to zero the game will be over.

6. The game could do with some sound. For example: add
an extra layer to the enemy movie clip. Put a blank keyframe on frame two of
this layer and put an explosion sound at this frame.

7. The lasers currently keep on travelling even when they
hit an enemy. You could change this by using the same code that is used to remove
a laser when it goes off the stage to remove the laser when it hits an enemy.

Some further enhancements.

Here are some ideas for how you could really change and
enhance the game.

1. Add in something to collect such as a bonus or people
to be rescued (like in the old game Defender).

2. Change the movement and scrolling so that the background
scrolls down the stage and the player moves up the stage. This could then be
the basis for a space shooting game like the old games Galaga or Galaxian. If
you change the background to look like a road you could have the basis for a
top view driving game like the old game Spy Hunter.

Anyway, I hope you have you found these tutorials useful
and I wish you lots of success with your flash games.

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